This is a clip from Food, Inc. I just finished watching it, and I’m all fired up. The man in this clip is Joel Salatin, and he runs a “beyond organic” farm. Warning…there is a scene of chicken slaughtering in the middle of the clip. If you watch the rest of the movie, you will breathe a sigh of relief watching Mr. Salatin’s operation. In this clip, they look like clean, healthy chickens, and then they look like clean, healthy food. No matter how it happens, there are a few unpleasant moments in between. Making your peace with animals being killed to produce food is not the same as shutting your eyes and plugging your ears to how it happens.

Before this, toward the beginning of the movie, we see how chickens are produced for the mainstream food industry. Nothing is pleasant about it…drawers of hatching chicks, big machines that inject the little guys with hormones, dark chicken houses where they grow so fast that their muscles and organs can’t keep up, and big chicken producing corporations that result in an average chicken farmer who is $500,000 in debt and makes a whopping $18,000 a year.

The main purpose of this movie seems to be to shed light on how food is produced and where food really comes from. The main point of that purpose is that food is an industry, a big business, and it is the consumers that are honestly driving this bus. Walmart made a change due to consumer demand: They no longer sell milk from cows treated with rBST (artificial growth hormones). Any of it. Not just their store brand, but all of their suppliers of milk. Walmart!!! That is a huge player in the food industry. We don’t (in my opinion) have the right to say, “Everyone should eat the way I eat!!!” We do, however, get to vote daily on what kinds of foods are available and affordable. Where we put our food dollars, we are telling the food production industry what to do more of.

I am also in love with this man. 🙂 This is an interview with Troy Roush, a corn farmer, about his participation in Food, Inc., not a clip from the movie. But he ends this interview much in the same way he ends the movie, as the last voice heard in Food, Inc. His family has been farming for five generations, and he would like to continue. Farmers (much like those chicken farmers) do what the big food production corporations make them do, because they need to make money. And the big corporations are driven by consumer demand. So we, in essence, tell the farmers what we want, how we want our food produced, what kinds of foods we want.

Food, Inc. barely touches on the nutritional effects of food produced in the mainstream industry versus food produced on farms like Mr. Salatin’s, and while it is very hard to get definitive research on the topic–I mean, you can’t exactly feed a bunch of kids high levels of pesticides and watch what happens–there is much information elsewhere. But after seeing this movie, my logic tells me this:

A human body that is fed unhealthy food, a diet not ideal for a human, turns into a large, unhealthy body.

A chicken that is fed unhealthy food, a diet not ideal for a chicken, turns in to a large, unhealthy chicken.

A human body that is fed meat from a large, unhealthy chicken, is consuming unhealthy food, even if it’s chicken.

I will be making some changes in how I spend my food dollar. Small changes. Sustainable changes, not impulsive, short-lived changes. This body has been receiving crap for the past couple of years…well, more like the last 24 years…my momma fed me pretty well in the beginning. 🙂 This post comes from nothing resembling a high horse. No high horses live here. This is just me, reflecting on what I learned, and reflecting it out to you. We are what we eat, people. And what we choose to buy, they will continue to produce for us to eat.